Dear Twitter, You Are Beautiful. Stop Trying to Be Someone Else

Another week, another tweak to Twitter's user interface. This one, in case you missed it, was a tentative upgrade that leaked via the profile of our Assistant Features Editor Matt Petronzio; one that made Twitter look like the lovechild of Facebook and Google+.

Twitter, as it frequently reminds us, performs various design tests on random users from time to time. But the fact that this profile page design is even being seriously considered shows where its design thinking is going: big pictures, big children's book-like text, and jumbled posts scattered around (a later revision returned the posts to reverse chronological order, but kept their size). This, or some version of it, is what the newer, "friendlier" Twitter will look like.

For the last six months or so, Twitter has been trying on a variety of new styles. On Thursday, CEO Dick Costolo told a Goldman Sachs conference that the redesigns were helping it to become "an indispensable companion to life in the moment," which many of us thought it already was. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say the company is acting like a skittish and self-loathing teenager who wants to look like the cool kids — Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest — in short, anyone but itself.

What most of us want to say is exactly what we'd say to that teenager: You are beautiful. Just be yourself. Your reverse-chronological stream of text-based tweets does not make you look ugly; it's part of who you are. But saying that around Twitter at the moment would likely provoke the same sort of eye-rolling reaction you'd get from the teenager. You don't understand! Leave me alone!

This particular redesign affected the web client, but Twitter's mobile apps are not immune to self-denying changes either. One that many of us found irksome arrived at the end of last year; it made pictures the default entry when crafting a new tweet on the mobile app. Your phone's camera roll appears where the keyboard used to be, whether you want it to or not (and regardless of whether the camera roll contains embarrassing drunk selfies you'd rather not have seen in a public forum).

For those of us who wanted to do anything as old-school as enter text, Twitter inserted an extra layer of difficulty. Thanks, guys. Love ya, mean it!

We all know what's driving this: the desire to look cool to Wall Street, something Twitter struggled with on its most recent earnings call. And Wall Street, because it is focused on the short term, likes any news that suggests Twitter is becoming more like its overachiever or an elder cousin, Facebook. The loss of 20% of the company's value immediately after that call may have made a redesign seem even more imperative. But Twitter has become too eager to please. We've seen tech companies go public and then shift toward what it thinks the market wants; it rarely goes well.

We've also seen at least one major company go public, then tell the market quite explicitly in a letter that it has a long-term strategy and isn't going to be distracted by stock price corrections — namely Google. (The market rewarded it anyway. Just be yourself.)

So Valentine's Day seems as good a time as any to let Twitter know how we feel — you, me, and the 200 million other users who joined up because we liked what we saw. We love text — short bursts of it, playful RTs of it, links to more of it. We like photos, but we think emphasizing them too much is like a bald man giving himself a combover. (Embrace your baldness!)

We love up-to-the-second coverage and commentary. We like the newness of reverse-chronological order, and no, we don't think it's a bit confusing for new users — after all, this is how most blogs and news sites have organized themselves for years. You already are our indispensable companion. Don't change. You're perfect.

(That said, if you did feel like changing, we'd love you all the more if you could give us the same "Quote Tweet" option on the web client as you get on mobile. Thanks!)

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